The Cybersecurity Startup Report

The startups making waves in cybersecurity this month

EnvKey

EnvKey essentially acts as a password manager for API keys, offering companies a secure place to store API keys and credentials, so if an engineer, for example, leaves, the company doesn’t have to go through the hassle of finding where credentials are stored, who can access what and how everything can be changed on a massive scale.

“At the last place I worked, a coworker got fired and my manager said, he said, okay, we need to change all the API keys across the infrastructure — and it was Friday at 4 pm,” said EnvKey’s founder Dane Schneider. “I had to tell him that’s not something we can just do right now. That’s a bit of an undertaking.”

Sqreen

French-startup Sqreen has launched Security Hub, an automated and real-time security solution that protects companies’ web services with minimum effort. The software is especially useful for smaller companies who are vulnerable to SQL injections, XSS attacks and brute-force attacks, but who don’t necessarily have the time or funds to assign the task to a dedicated team.

In addition to protecting against attacks, Sqreen also makes security recommendations so that vulnerabilities can be identified and fixed.

To use Sqreen, users install a library package on their server and add a couple of lines at the top of their source code. Once this is done, Sqreen monitors attacks in real time without a big performance hit.

Anon AI

Winner of ‘Best in Cybersecurity’ at UKTN’s Elevator Pitch LIVE, Anon AI has developed software that automatically anonymises data, which enables developers and data scientists to share it securely.

“Anon AI addresses the dual challenge of maintaining the security of mass personal data and preserving innovation. Its experienced team and cutting edge AI software give it an excellent opportunity to take an industry leading position in a market which stands at £30m+ in the financial services industry alone.” said David Grimm, investment manager for the UCL Technology Fund, which is where Anon AI emerged from.

Aperio

Israel’s Aperio Systems aims to make it easier for operators to detect and mitigate potential intrusions into critical infrastructure, like power plants, before they can cause any harm, by using machine learning to detect when data has been tampered with.

Hackers typically try to hide their activities by tricking sensors into reporting that everything is working as usual. However, Aperio’s tools don’t just look at the data sensors report but also at all of the noise that’s typically filtered out. Hackers can’t reproduce this noise, so the system knows something’s amiss. Looking at the plant as a whole, Aperio can also typically tell you what’s actually happening underneath the forged data so that operators can decide whether they have to hit the red button and shut down operations, or whether they have enough time for a controlled shutdown.